Twitter 'verified' check marks bought by Taliban appear to have been removed

Source: The Guardian

Twitter ‘verified’ check marks bought by Taliban appear to have been removed

Afghanistan’s hardline Islamist rulers had never carried a verification tick mark before the launch of Twitter Blue

Ramon Antonio Vargas
Tue 17 Jan 2023 16.04 GMT
Last modified on Tue 17 Jan 2023 16.22 GMT

Twitter account verifications bought by the Taliban appear to have been removed, after many expressed outrage that the social media platform had given its blue check marks to Afghanistan’s hardline Islamist rulers.

Twitter previously only gave blue “verified” check marks to accounts that were considered “active, notable and authentic accounts of public interest”. But since Elon Musk acquired the platform last year, users can buy them from the Twitter Blue service for a fee – an option at least two officials of the Taliban government in Afghanistan had exercised.

The head of the Taliban’s department for “access to information”, Hedayatullah Hedayat, and its top media watchdog, Abdul Haq Hammad, each had blue ticks on their accounts as of Monday. The two men’s accounts have 187,000 and 170,000 followers each. Hedayat’s – which regularly publishes information about Taliban administration matters – had previously got its tick back after it was first removed in December.

The BBC reported on Monday that Hedayat and Hammad had successfully become Twitter Blue subscribers, allowing them to get verification marks that they and others in the Taliban had previously lacked.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/17/twitter-blue-verified-taliban